The Internet provides a number of ways for individuals to communicate with one another. A user may have one or more e-mail accounts, instant messaging accounts, Twitter accounts, blogs, and the like. There are also multiple social networking websites available in which individuals can post, send or receive information, such as through Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. The accounts may have parts that are publicly accessible, but may have other parts that have limited accessibility. Access may be limited to a group of individuals or only to the user. Access is generally controlled through authorization protocols. As an example, most if not all of these accounts require a username that acts to identify the individual seeking access and a password or code. The password or code prevents unauthorized persons from using the username to gain access to the website. Some web sites employ additional layers of security to assure that access is limited only to authorized users. In addition, the information or data in each of these websites or accounts may be in various formats, some of which may be proprietary to the website. Importing and exporting data by a user or by external programs may be difficult and time consuming.
As an example, a person may have multiple email accounts through different providers, such as a work email address, a personal email address and a family email address. Each of these accounts may have a different username and password associated with the account, which must be provided before the user may access any information from these accounts. Each of these accounts is accessible through the Internet, but the data contained in many of these accounts are in various formats since these accounts may originate from different service providers. Each of the service providers may also use different methods of communication when a user seeks to obtain information from these accounts. For example, the log on and authentication procedures for these accounts may differ from provider to provider.
Many of these user accounts have information that may be useful if aggregated or collected into a single location and/or distributed between various accounts. For example, photos contained within an account such as those provided by Flickr may be useful if aggregated together with an account relating to Yahoo! personals, Facebook or Twitter. This cross-networking of social information and communications can increase user engagement, improve insights and allow cross-promotion. It would also allow the aggregation of contacts and synchronization of information across various sources and/or accounts. There are some services for aggregating limited amounts of information of a user such as a service provided by Plaxo. However, these services provided limited capabilities of information aggregation.
Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.